About

We believe every child has the right to feel safe, have fun, enjoy learning and have access to an education which opens doors and offers opportunities to fulfil their potential.

We aim to build the capacity of schools to provide these learning environments, and to recognise and respond effectively and flexibly to the needs of children who have experienced trauma and adversity in life. We are committed to building a community of like-minded professionals, connected in their desire to sustain this work, boost the resilience of the children they teach, and advocate at every level for education which is truly trauma responsive.

We bring the best ideas from the fields of neuroscience, educational psychotherapy, attachment theory, positive psychology and mindfulness into education in a connected, compassionate, practical way. 

Marie is a teacher, educational psychotherapist, trainer and writer based in Crosshaven, Cork. She has extensive experience of working with students who have been affected by traumatic experiences and who display challenging behaviour, having worked in non-formal education, mainstream and special school settings in the UK and Ireland. She works internationally offering training and consultancy and has trained teachers, school counsellors and foster carers in many countries across the world, including the post-conflict areas of Iraq and Lebanon. She firmly believes that where you start from in life should not have to dictate your destination and in the power of education to break down barriers to societal change.
She has focused for over 25 years on finding practical ways to engage more students in learning, particularly those that seem ‘unreachable’ and to bring insights from fields outside education into schools. This has driven her interest in positive psychology, neuroscience, attachment theory and trauma responsive approaches. As a practitioner she always wants to know ‘How can this be applied in reality to understand and support those students who are at risk of disconnecting from learning?’
In recent years she has created a model of reflective staff supervision which acknowledges that we cannot create trauma responsive schools if we do not support the adults who are working with vulnerable students.
For Worth Publishing, she is the author of ‘Teaching the Unteachable’ (2008), ‘What can I do with the kid who.. (2010). ‘Attachment for Teachers’ (2017) and for Oxford University Press, ‘Into the Classroom: Special Educational Needs’ (2016). She also regularly writes materials for the British Council, including their courses on Inclusion and The Impact of Trauma in the Classroom.
When not working, Marie keeps the AerLingus airline in credit with trips between the UK and Ireland to visit family and is a proud supporter of Leeds Utd Football Club and the Tipperary hurling team.  

With over 20 years of healthcare research under her belt, Lisa built on a BSc(Hons) in Microbiology to forge a successful research career in London and Edinburgh. She has worked on new treatments for HIV with the Medical Research Council, set up a cancer research network for the NHS, and consulted for an international development agency before moving to manage in-depth analysis of the oncology market for the pharmaceutical sector.
Lisa returned to Ireland in 2010 to pioneer behaviour change interventions for GPs to improve cancer prevention. More recently, Lisa has been working as a consultant for the pharmaceutical industry analysing complex data and translating it into meaningful recommendations.
She is now using her experience to fulfil a long-held ambition: to create a collaborative and supportive network of educators to help improve outcomes for traumatised children. As a strong believer in social justice, she’s long felt that more could be done to support those in the front line, and to enable them to bring about lasting, societal change for the betterment of all children.
Her lifelong passion for research together with her insistence on getting to the root of an issue, keeps her fascinated by the latest trends in trauma-informed and trauma-responsive education.
When not reading about the latest developments in neuroscience, mother of two Lisa loves nothing more than spending family days at the beach near her seaside home, and is often found walking, practicing mindfulness, or enjoying the great outdoors – and the Irish weather!